Saul Bellow

Forget that Packers-Bears rivalry. The greatest grudge match in history was waged by Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald over the proper way to write fiction. In a letter to Fitzgerald, Wolfe called himself a “putter-inner.” He tried to cram life — big, rollicking, loud, sloppy life — onto the page. Fitzgerald, Wolfe said, was a “leaver-outer.” He distilled life's unruly swarm of sensations and experiences into simple, elegant sentences. With Wednesday's announcement that the new pick for the Chicago Public Library's One Book, One Chicago program is Saul Bellow's gorgeous grab bag of a novel, “The Adventures of Augie...

Related "Saul Bellow" Articles

June 10 marks the centennial of Chicago author Saul Bellow's birthday. In tribute to Bellow, Paul Buhle and Walton Muyumba reflect on his varied merits.
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How Saul Bellow saved the Yiddish language
By Paul Buhle
Of the many millions who treasure Saul...

At 3:25 p.m. on April 24, 1915, a group of Midwestern authors held their first official meeting in Club Room No. 1 of the Auditorium Hotel, kick-starting an organization of writers that would still be in existence a century later.
That group was the...

I had long taught Saul Bellow, and have long stopped teaching Bellow. "The Adventures of Augie March," his 1954 National Book Award-winning novel, is an epic tale of Chicago imagined as an open grid of personal possibility edged by harsh...

Editor's note: This week, we take a look back at a 1977 piece by Saul Bellow. The essay, which appeared about a year after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was excerpted from the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. Later this month, a new...

Sometimes I wonder how many books I've read in my four decades. Thousands, anyway — maybe tens of thousands — since the first one, about a choo-choo, when I was not quite 3. Right up to Anne Carson's “Autobiography of Red,” finished yesterday, a book that...

Aleksandar Hemon landed in the United States two decades ago, January 1992. He was 27, a young Bosnian journalist from Sarajevo arriving on a one-month visa, arranged through a cultural exchange program sponsored by the State Department. Just after he...

Hi, my name is Alan, and I'm drunk with landscape.
I've just finished teaching a writing workshop in how to deploy setting in modern fiction, mainly, the modern novel, so I couldn't easily get the subject off my mind in any case. And now, just as the...

Being a writer comes bundled with numerous small humiliations, but one of the worst, in my experience, is approaching other writers for blurbs of my own books.
You know blurbs, those pithy little sentences that grace the backs (or sometimes the fronts)...

Every journalist's nightmare is the interview with the subject who responds to questions with one-sentence (or even one-word) answers. Fortunately, the writer Nathan Englander — who was in Chicago recently as the inaugural Crown Speaker Series lecturer at...

There's a certain type of reader — often also a writer, with a leaf-fring'd MFA — who has it all figured out. The realist novel is a scam, a factory producing cardboard imitations of bourgeois life. This is the person at the party who mentions having read...

In 51 years, no concussions. Despite low-hanging pipes that loop across ceilings and snake down walls, work spaces with clearances barely 5 feet high, and a tight maze full of blind spots where customers could easily collide — the Seminary Co-op Bookstore...

Jami Attenberg’s family tragedy arrives bearing the imprimatur of Jonathan Franzen, who has praised the author’s “sympathy” and “artistry.” Franzen’s endorsement makes a fair amount of sense.True, "The Middlesteins" does not strive for quite...

On the opening night of Chicago Live! Thursday, in its new home at Pipers Alley with The Second City, the show didn't feel new: It felt like a homecoming. No one from Chicago would feel out of place.Rick Kogan needed no script to talk about the 43rd Ward....

We all live in a unique neighborhood called Old Norwood Park on the city's far Northwest Side. All 11 members live within walking distance of one another. We have been meeting at each other's homes almost every month for five years.
Our...

Lately, I've been trying to cure myself of my packrat tendencies and have been sorting through boxes of papers and mementos I've amassed over the years. In the box I most recently opened, I found an old Comiskey Park ticket stub from a Sox game I attended...

If you can imagine a bricklayer who's had it up to here with bricks, or a pastry chef who's frankly a little ambivalent about the whole flour and sugar deal, then you get Daniel Clowes.
He works with words and pictures, but he's pretty suspicious of...